With regards to Ciri's age, she's 21 during the main events in The Witcher 3.
At the end of the books she's 17.
No idea if they'll play down the salaciousness or not, but given when the game will likely take place that at least won't be any issues with the main character being a minor.
OLED alone even without HDR adds a noticeable difference in contrast ratio. Meaning blacks look blacker even when right next to bright whites. HDR improves that, provided you have HDR content to enjoy.
An issue with some (much) older OLEDs was burn in, but at least in my experience, with more modern displays that seems to be much less of an issue. A lot of displays have a burn in reduction feature on board that seems to generally work well and the actual LEDs have gotten more durable as the tech has advanced.
I have an OLED display hooked up to an old rpi running my homeassistant control panel. It's been displaying an essentially static image for nearly two years without any burn in.
Personally, I'd recommend an OLED monitor. If you can afford it, go for high resolution and high refresh rate. If you primarily watch video prioritize resolution, if you primarily game prioritize refresh rate. Though you may have issues going over 120Hz on Linux.
As for your DE, Mint should support KDE Plasma and you should be able install it like any other package. Might be worth looking up a guide for that. However, I won't recommend against switching to Fedora. It's what I use and I haven't had any notable issues and their documentation seems pretty solid.
Basically the only games I want to play that have Denuvo currently are a handful of games published by ATLUS like Persona 5 the Royal and Metaphor: Refantazio.
I actually bought Metaphor, not realizing it had Denuvo, and then was just randomly unable to launch the game. After fiddling with some proton settings and reopening the game I got a very generic error message with a link to a website that told me I was locked out of the game for 24 hours.
For coffee: lower risk of heart disease, kidney disease, and type-2 diabetes. As well as lower risks for a handful of degenerative neurological disorders.
I would agree with you if they made caffeine pills in a range of doses. Though admittedly it's been a while since I've looked into caffeine pills, I don't remember seeing anything that less than 200mg of caffeine per dose. Which is a fairly high dose. Most energy drinks contain a little more than half of that.
This also ignores the fact that for a lot of people the act of preparing and drinking their beverage of choice is part of their daily morning preparation. That morning ritual is part of good sleep hygiene as it helps you transition into being awake and alert for the day.
Plus there are other health benefits to drinking coffee or tea that you don't get from the caffeine alone.
If it means a return to random encounters, no absolutely not. There's a reason I don't go back and replay the older games even though I have fond memories of them. That reason is largely Zubat. Fuck you Zubat.
But also, aside from a handful of bugs and performance problems Scarlet/Violet and Legends: Arceus are the best the franchise has ever been. I'd rather they refine what they're already doing and keep making things better rather then regress purely to appease someone's misguided nostalgia.
I'll believe HL:3 is real when it is for sale, purchased by me, and played in it's entirety. And even then it might just be a particularly vivid delusion.
HL:3 is gaming's dark matter. Until all other possibilities are definitively ruled out, it's not HL:3.
WoW is a great example. They force an internet requirement in order to justify a subscription model. The subscription model is one of the many things wrong with the gaming industry.
Neverwinter Nights included the game server with the game (nwserver.exe). I never played Ultima Online, but it definitely has ways to host your own server now. A lot of MMOs from that era also had self-hostable servers at the time. Pretty much every MMO prior to WoW had some way to run your own server.
As for the existence of bad games prior to the internet, I'm not arguing that bad games didn't exist then. I am arguing that there were fewer of them as a percentage of the total games market because it was a lot of work to patch a game after release, and unless you could tie in to an existing popular IP it wasn't worthwhile to release something you knew would bomb.
I'm also arguing that there were fewer (as in near zero) games that engaged in predatory practices like selling lootboxes, or worthless in-game items, or otherwise using micro transactions to boost revenue, because it would be too inconvenient to buy for the player meaning there was no market for it.
Blu-ray is proprietary in the sense that companies have to pay a licensing fee to put the blu-ray stamp on their disc and officially claim to be a blu-ray, but is otherwise an open standard. DVD and CD are both the same way.
As for on-disc DRM, as long as it never touches the network, it doesn't bother me that much. It's still less than ideal, but it's less of a problem when compared to online DRM.
As for GoG, I applaud their stance towards providing DRM free games, however they are still a digital distribution platform, and suggesting them as an alternative to physical media misses the point of the original post as an internet connection is still required to obtain the game.
Extreme tariffs are crashing the US economy right now by making it unprofitable for a lot of businesses to do business within that economy. It's not a boycott if you can't afford the product or if you can't even buy the product because the company refuses to sell to you because they don't think you'd be willing to pay the price they are now required to charge just to make a profit.
Why? I have more than enough storage already. That isn't the point of wanting physical media.
When you're able to install off of physical media you have a builtin backup, you have something you can loan to friends, something you can sell when you're done with it, and something that can't be taken from you just because a company went under or lost a publishing license.
Also, at least in the time prior to the prominence of digital distribution you had some assurance that the game would at least function because the company making the game knew they wouldn't be able to just push a day-one update.
I absolutely want to go back to physical media. Preferably some sort of non-proprietary medium, like CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, or a USB connected flash storage device.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_(United_States)
The term village is used to describe certain categories of populated areas, either colloquially or legally, in 27 states.